Good morning. It is March 10th. It is sunny in New York on the way to a distinctly spring like forecast high of 62 or 61, depending on which forecast you read and whether you can tell the difference. The weekend wildfires on Long Island have been put out, but more hot, dry winds are coming. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news.

Homeland Security officers seized one of the organizers of Columbia's student protests, Mahmoud Khalil, from his university-owned apartment on Saturday night. Despite the fact that he is a permanent U.S. resident married to a U.S. citizen, the officers reportedly told him that his student visa had been revoked. When he told them he was on a green card instead of a student visa, they told him that his green card had been revoked. After incorrectly saying that he had been detained in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and leaving his whereabouts unknown for a day. The government now says he's locked up in Backwoods, Louisiana. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on x.com to say that the Trump administration will be revoking visas and green cards from people who support Hamas. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security likewise declared that this was about President Donald Trump's executive order about combating anti-Semitism in the name of which the Trump administration has rewarded Columbia for its collaboration with the McCarthyite anti-protest movement by attempting to strip the university of $400 million in funding. Before the immigration and customs enforcement officials came around to yank a lawful resident out of his home and lock him up for exercising his first amendment rights, users of x.com had urged Marco Rubio to deport Khalil. The people seeking to urge the government to punish him included Shai Davidai, an aggressively anti-Palestinian professor at the Columbia Business School whose harassment of university employees had gotten him kicked off campus. That's apparently who gets to decide who's allowed to be in this country or not. The story of this apparently naked government persecution of a political protester in Manhattan, on property owned by Columbia University makes page A13 in this morning's New York Times, given the difficulties of wrangling the job of putting the physical newspaper together over the weekend. 

The Indignity Morning podcast is going to wait and see how it plays in tomorrow's paper before judging how the story slots in with the Times' other assiduous attention to protest related issues on Ivy League campuses.

They did mobilize reporters to get a reasonably thorough story about the arrest into the paper and even went to the trouble, which they often don't do in comparable circumstances on regular weekdays, to include the news of the arrest in the accompanying story about the administration's attempt to financially punish Columbia and the question of whether other elite schools are next. That is so far, much more of an assertive response to the shocking news by the New York Times than anything Columbia University has come up with. The most recent statement on the Columbia University Office of Public Affairs website is a generic response to news that ICE has been operating around campus, saying law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public university areas, including residential university buildings, with no reference at all to the question of whether these officers had a warrant before they seized someone from their university building. Columbia, the statement continues, “is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community.” 

On the front of the morning Times, the lead news story, two columns wide is “Deepening Peril of Disease As Trump Cuts Foreign Aid / With Safeguards Eroding, Scientists Warn of Outbreaks That May Reach U.S.” A valid warning story about the dangers posed by the Trump administration's malicious and illegal blockages of spending, that nevertheless manages to be a little bit gross in that the lead expert quoted, who runs an African health nonprofit, feels compelled to say it's actually in the interest of American people to keep diseases down, and that diseases make their way to the U.S. even when we have our best people on it. And now we are not putting our best people on it. The fact that millions of people around the world are losing access to vital medical treatment is not enough to turn the tide. Americans have to be told that those people's suffering and dying could potentially also spread disease to the U.S., which to be sure, it absolutely could and absolutely will. But that's a heck of a framework for looking at why it matters that the rest of the world receives medical treatment. 

In other health inequities news, next to that is a grim well-done story, “Organ Transplant System ‘in Chaos’ As Waiting Lists Are Ignored,” which describes how weak regulation, eroding ethical norms and perverse and or corrupt incentives have produced a situation where the organizations that distribute organs routinely send them to favored hospitals and to less direly needy patients, while the sickest people at the top of the list wait and eventually die without ever finding out that the organ that might have saved them got passed off to someone else. The harm from this gets allocated exactly the way you would expect the harm to be allocated. White people, the Times writes, “make up 39 % of the organ registry data, shows they have a leg up even in the normal process. Last year they received 46 % of transplants, but when the list was ignored and patients were skipped, they got 50%. Other groups have benefited too data shows Asian patients, men, college graduates and candidates at larger hospitals.” The practice of routinely skipping the wait list took off around 2020 and was supposed to allow organizations to save time when they were having trouble placing an organ with the right person on the wait list to reduce the rate at which organs were discarded. Instead, the discard rate has gone up, but the transplant centers are able to use the flexibility to put the organs into healthier patients and thereby show insurance companies and government regulators, improvements in their own all-important transplant success rates.

Down below the fold on the left is a news analysis piece. “Contradictions
Provide Trump Political Cover.” Dateline Washington. “What does President Trump really believe? Does he want to run for a third term or is that just a joke? Does he intend to seize control of Gaza and expel millions of Palestinians or is that just a suggestion? Is Black History Month a waste of time and money or worth a lavish celebration at the White House? Anyone looking for definitive answers,” the Times continues, “will have a hard time finding them. Since storming back into office,” —Storming?— “Mr. Trump has used a dizzying rhetorical tactic of shifting positions like quicksand, muddying his messages and contradicting himself, sometimes in the same day. The inconsistencies have presented the American public with dueling narratives at every turn, allowing people to pick and choose what they want to believe about the president's intentions.” When it tries to dig further into examples, though, the piece runs aground. “Within hours of taking office, Mr. Trump pardoned January 6th rioters who assaulted Capitol Police officers, a move that clashed with his professed support for law enforcement.” There's a saying somebody posted this past weekend. “It's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy,” which is a pretty helpful guideline to avoid getting yourself too twisted up over things like that. Trump may talk a lot about respecting cops, but on the subject of the January 6th attack, his position throughout the campaign was extremely clear. The people who stormed the Capitol were his people and he was going to take care of them. The Capitol police were on the wrong side of his authority. The story moves on to say “he spent his first weeks disparaging diversity, equity and inclusion policies as harmful. He blamed diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration for a deadly plane crash in January over the Potomac River, equating diversity with incompetence. But just hours after asserting the agency had been targeted under a previous administration for being too white, he equivocated, saying race or gender may have played a role in the crash. ‘I don't know. Incompetence might have played a role, he said, adding, we want the most competent people. We don't care what race they are.’”

That doesn't even rise to the level of an equivocation. That is just the well-worn Trump rhetorical device of tossing in an “I don't know” before going ahead and saying whatever false and disparaging thing he was going to say. That's just Trump 101. If anything, what defines his second administration so far is that when he says he's going to do something, no matter how lawless, abusive, absurd or self-destructive it may be, he really does tend to just go ahead and do it. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going. Through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips, please continue to send those along if you can. And if nothing unforeseen gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.